Although I’ve successfullying upgraded the same Ubuntu droplet in the past two years and just got 16.04 working, I needed to get support to reset the networking.

That gave rise to some comments to the advantages/disadvantages of a kernel provided by the “do-release-upgrade” (term used was a hypervisor managed kernel) and those provided by DigitalOcean via the control panel (term used was a managed kernel).

I don’t understand!
Please can someone explain.

Am I unusual in having used “do-release-upgrade”?

Do most clients of DigitalOcean use the kernel provided when the droplet is created and only keep the security updated. Then create a new droplet when a new Ubuntu version is released and migrate all programs and data over?

Thanks
John